The Din in the Head

by Cynthia Ozick

  The mistake is this: that a poet's life weighs in the same scale as the poems themselves. It goes without saying that Sylvia Plath's published journals are archivally valuable, and that they do far more than simply feed our curiosity. In addition to personal revelations—uninhibited news from the inside, so to speak: "Do you realize the illicit sensuous delight that I get from picking my nose?...There are so many subtle variations of sensation ... A delicate, pointed-nailed fifth finger can catch under dry scabs and flakes of mucus in the nostril and draw them out to be looked at ... God, what a sexual satisfaction!"—in addition to Ancient-Mariner-creatures-of-the-sea moments like these, the journals render the temper of a time, its social and intellectual airs. And here we can discover the abyss between the life and the work, between Plath's days, which are evanescent, and Plath's poems, which are indelible. To look for the poems in the life—in the sense of cause-and-effect—is not merely a tedium; it is a fool's errand.

  "The true writer," says Cyril Connolly (who, like most writers, never wrote a masterpiece), "has only one function: to write a masterpiece. Anything less, any partial appeal, marks that writer as bogus." But readers, too, can be bogus. To mine the journals for Plath's despairs and exhilarations, or for her accounts of dresses and boyfriends and dinners—"chicken soup, good and creamy, delicious stuffed tomatoes, turkey with the usual unredeemed chip potatoes and overcooked dried peas"; or to read the journals backward from Plath's suicide in the hope of finding clues to it—all this is bogus. Finally the legend is smoke. Finally there are the poems and only the poems.

  Which is not to discount the interest of the times—particularly because Plath defied them, strangely, by not always living up to them. Her youth—an inept word, since she never had anything else—was lived out in a period of rigid hierarchy: it was high art or nothing. Or, rather, it was high art or infinite scorn. The mixture, or side-by-sideness, of high and low, which we take for granted today (whether or not we call it postmodernism), was then inconceivable. Noses were for looking down at. A young writer of verse or prose would no more have thought of entering a contest for Seventeen magazine, or dreamed of having stories published in McCalls or the Ladies' Home Journal, than of sitting down in a lake of muck. The periodicals that serious young writers aspired to were the prestigious so-called "little" magazines, Partisan and Kenyan and Hudson, and a handful of other mystically highbrow quarterlies.

  I remember the sensation, in those long-ago days, of opening The New Yorker and searching for the poems, and coming nearly simultaneously on two startling poets, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Cecile Rich (as she then styled herself)—and knowing instantly that there on the page, flaming through it, was, in Plath's words, "pure acetylene." The journals disclose that Plath targeted Rich as her chief rival, soon to be overtaken: "Jealous one am I, green-eyed, spite-seething." On April 17, 1958, at twenty-six, she wrote: "I have the joyous feeling of leashed power—also the feeling that in a year or two I should be 'recognized'—as I am not at all now, though I sit on poems richer than any Adrienne Cecile Rich." Those early poems of Plath's were stitched in gaudy language and technique, secret rhymes intended only for the eye, images bewitched by the neighbor-images they were compelled to serve, each single word rinsed in newness.

  And in this same season Plath was longing for what seems incongruous now, and in the rarefied mental scene of fifty-odd years ago was even more incongruous. Virginia Woolf's diaries rest easily alongside the body of her other writing; they are an equal masterwork. Artistically, they are all at high tide. Sylvia Plath's journals are not; they are jagged things. Plath wanted to succeed in the slick women's magazines and in the Saturday Evening Post. The stories were sent there; the poems went to The New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Harper's Magazine. She read Melville and James and Yeats and of course Eliot; and meanwhile she was swallowing the Ladies' Home Journal whole, setting down long paragraphs recounting the plots of its published stories, and listing inventories of possible plots of her own: "Husband comes home; new understanding ... beautiful cakes." She imagined being "a vagabond wife," yet she rejoiced in a husband who was, she crowed, "the man the unsatisfied ladies scan the Ladies' Home Journal for, the man women read romantic novels for ... and I love cooking for him (made him a lemon layer cake last night) and being secretary, and all."

  She was not a bluestocking or a half-bohemian like the rest of the strenuous literary strivers of the same generation. She never went down to the Village to gawk at Auden shuffling along in his carpet slippers, or to catch a glimpse of Marianne Moore in her tricorn hat. Instead she sailed up to Mademoiselle as a fashion-magazine prizewinner and interviewed Marianne Moore as her prize, wearing a double string of pearls and a flat little hat of her own over a polished every-hair-in-place pageboy. She was both Emily Dickinson and Betty Crocker—which is why the journals are inscrutable, and in this respect more shocking than the suicide.

  The journals: the gifted drawings, the passages of lyrical narrative, the cutting and cunning intellect, the jealousy, the anger, the lemon layer cakes, the slicks, the clear ascent from girlish infatuations to sober maturity, the whole human spectrum—and then the effectively superhuman, the year-by-year accretion of the journals themselves; and the drive, the drive, the drive. But come back to the Collected Poems—the full fierce force of their conflagrations—and the journals and their lemon cakes and their good husband and their bad husband, all taken together, become as ash. "Does not my heat astound you," she asks, and yes, it burns all the rest to dross.

  Kipling: A Postcolonial Footnote

  RUDYARD KIPLING IS INCONTROVERTIBLY ONE of the most renowned writers of the early twentieth century. Yet despite his name's irrepressible familiarity, he is also among the most disavowed. There may still be imaginatively wise children who prefer the enchantments of any page of Just So Stories (adorned with Kipling's own magical illustrations and ingenious verses) to the crude smatterings of the film cartoons—but Kipling is vastly more than a children's treasure. All the same, serious readers long ago relinquished him: who now speaks of Kipling?

  The reason is partly contemporary political condemnation—enlightened postcolonial disdain—and partly contemporary literary prejudice. Together with Conrad, Kipling carries the opprobrium of empire, "the white man's burden," though his lavish Indian stories are often sympathetically and vividly understanding of both Hindu and Muslim. And he is ignored on the literary side because in the period of Joyce's blooming Kipling's prose declined to be tricked out with the obvious involutions of modernism. Unlike Joyce, James, and Woolf, he gets at the interiors of his characters by boring inward from the rind. Yet he writes the most inventive, the most idiosyncratic, the most scrupulously surreal English sentences of his century (next to which Woolf's are more predictably commonplace).

  Kipling's late stories (he died in 1937)—"The Wish House" (in virtuoso dialect), "Dayspring Mishandled," "Mary Postgate," "The Gardener," "The Eye of Allah," "Baa Baa Black Sheep" (an autobiographical revelation), "Mrs. Bathhurst," and so many others—form a compact body of some of the strongest fiction of the last hundred years: sly, penetrating, ironically turned. Kipling's wizardry for setting language on its ear, his insight into every variety of humanity, his zest for science, for ghosts, for crowds, for countryside, cast him as a master of kaleidoscopic narrative; no strand of civilization escapes his worldly genius. So even the most zealous proponents of postcolonial theory deserve—or at least ought not to eschew—the pleasurable rewards of Kipling.

  Delmore Schwartz: The Willed Abortion of the Self

  LIKE SYLVIA PLATH a generation later, like Shelley a century before, Delmore Schwartz is one of those poets whose life inescapably rivals the work. Plath's fame is linked as much to the shock of the suicide as to the shock of the poetry; the wild romance of Shelley's lines is fulfilled in the drama of the drowning. And Delmore Schwartz catapults past the fickleness of mere reputation into something close to legend. What puts him there is not his ignominious end—he died, at fifty
-three, in chaotic solitude in a Manhattan hotel—but the clamorous periods of derangement that rocked him, side by side with spurts of virtuosity. It was a catastrophic life—turbulent, demanding, importuning, drinking, pill-swallowing, competitive, suspicious, litigious. He reveled in celebrity when it came to him and abused the friendships it attracted. At one point he appeared ready to sue nearly every literary luminary he knew. His incessant talk turned to aggressive harangue and accusation. But he early saw into the logic of his madness, attributing it to the rage of an ambition too overreaching ever to be attained. "The torment of disappointed hope becomes a brutality to myself," he wrote.

  He was, like many of the so-called New York Intellectuals of his generation, the aspiring son of Jewish immigrants. His parents were mismatched; his philandering father prospered in real estate until the Crash. Delmore followed sports, went obsessively to the movies, and judged his family and broken household with a harshly dismissive yet hotly bonded eye. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, he fell deliriously into modernism, Eliot and Pound and Joyce, and was steeped in avant-garde periodicals like Hound & Horn—but he failed Latin, and except for English made an indifferent record. He returned to New York to study philosophy with Sidney Hook and James Burnham at NYU's Washington Square College, where he met the first of his two wives. Both eventually left him; upheaval and rancor trailed him all his fabled days.

  Philosophy next lured him to Harvard. He worked at it under the eminent Alfred North Whitehead, but at length began to waver, and poetry won out. Yet philosophy infiltrated the poetry—not through narrow cognitive distinctions, but through discerning the naked thereness of things. Philosophy gave his lines the crystalline quality of naivete: the peculiar power to gaze into the self, or the world, as objects never before seen or contemplated. He became a metaphysician of the near-at-hand:

  If you look long enough at anything

  It will become extremely interesting;

  If you look very long at anything

  It will become rich, manifold, fascinating.

  Out of Whitehead's "the withness of the body" came

  The heavy bear who goes with me,

  A manifold honey to smear his face,

  Clumsy and lumbering here and there,

  The central ton of every place

  ...

  That inescapable animal that walks with me,

  Has followed me since the black womb held,

  Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,

  A caricature, a swollen shadow,

  A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,

  Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,

  The secret life of belly and bone,

  Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown...

  The penetration of this opacity Schwartz called "the parsing of context." His own body was a context to be parsed, however mercilessly, and even his name, the lyrical Delmore, was an outer-ness hinting at inner life: on the principle of nomen est numen— name is spirit—only a poet could be destined for so poetic a name. But such parsing will not inevitably lead to self-understanding. In "March 29" he cries:

  Behold! For we are absent from our knowledge, we are lost to the common undertaking of our lives, there are unleashed within us the small animals of silence....

  And in the shimmeringly titled "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave" an alert heaping up of the poet's surround accretes—aural, visual, atmospheric, above all needlingly concrete: the window and the window curtains, trucks passing, the milkman's footsteps, the bottles' clink, the horse, the street, the streetlight, the sky, a car's starter, a chair, a mirror, a dresser, a wall, a birdcall! Though each of these is possessed by an explicit presence, taken together all fall into elusive enigma:

  Perplexed, still wet

  With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so,

  O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail

  Of early morning, the mystery of beginning

  Again and again,

  while History is unforgiven.

  From the bedroom and its furnishings, to the mundane city-sounds of early morning, to the heartless chronicle of humankind.

  Why is history unforgiven? Perhaps because it is, after all, history, out of which all contradictions can be wrested and made palpable. "I hate an abstract thing," he complains in "The Ballad of the Children of the Czar"—wherein the czar's children bounce a ball in the czar's garden, while that same year Delmore, "aged two, irrational," eats a baked potato in Brooklyn, "six thousand miles apart." The czar's children play among flowerbeds, but the poet recalls that his grandfather, coughing and wretched in the czar's army, flees to America, "to become," he notes sardonically, "a king himself." The bouncing ball among the flowers and the baked potato in Brooklyn swell hugely, balefully, transmuted finally into the round earth itself, the "wheeling, whirling world":

  A pitiless, purposeless

  Thing, Arbitrary and unspent

  ...

  I am overtaken by terror

  Thinking of my father's fathers,

  And of my own will.

  The innocently small, the innocently tangible, can shockingly lurch into widening empty blind unknowingness: so that elsewhere, a night train with its passengers, the smoke, the dark, the "pencil lines of telephone posts, crucified," the scenes that rush by, turning away from hope, from history itself, reveal only "the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss":

  O your life, your lonely life

  What have you done with it,

  And done with the great gift of consciousness?

  Writing of Baudelaire, and purporting to enact the French poet's recklessly desperate psyche, it is himself whom Schwartz uncovers:

  I am sick of this life of furnished rooms.

  I am sick of having colds and headaches:

  You know my strange life. Every day brings

  Its quota of wrath. You little know

  A poet's life, dear Mother: I must write poems,

  The most fatiguing of occupations.

  Though intimations of the then prevailing imperium of The Waste Land seep through many of Schwartz's verses, and though they are permeated by the sort of acutely objective self-consciousness that characterizes much of the modernist ethos, Schwartz cannot, in either his poetry or his prose, be wholly defined as a modernist—a judgment that might have alarmed him. The tenor of his mind is largely like the tenor of his extravagantly Romantic given name—Romantically excessive, even incongruous, especially in the company of workaday Schwartz. Allusions, nineteenth-century-style, to Dionysus and Venus, to "Attic dust," "love's victory," "the day's splendor," "lights' glory," "his smile which glows like that of the spring moon," "the miracle of love," and abundantly more in that vein, attest more to Keats than to Prufrock, and more to earnest odes to beauty and despair than to anxious deadpan skeptical modernist reticence. "Everywhere radiance glows like a garden in stillness blossoming" is an idiom that, in all its shameless loveliness, seizes on the old roots of poetry. And here, in "Seurat's Sunday Afternoon along the Seine," one can catch, with rapt directness, the unconcealed Keatsian tone:

  O happy, happy throng,

  It is forever Sunday, summer, free

  All this discloses a poet's escape, if he wills it, from the commanding Zeitgeist. Or even if he does not will it, if it comes unwittingly, unsummoned, from his nature—libertarian, untethered, deaf to all authority but the imperative inward chant. How else account for the startling grandeur of "Starlight Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve," a title that, even apart from the lines that follow, carries a nimbus almost too bright to bear?

  Put it that the poetry is Delmore; its themes are chiefly (and in his own fearsome words) awe and abyss. But the prose? The prose is Schwartz. The language of the stories is plain, simple, never convoluted or mandarin; practical and ordinary. "It is Sunday afternoon, June 12th, 1909, and my father is on his way to visit my mother," commences the second paragraph of "In Dreams Begin Respo
nsibilities," Schwartz's most celebrated fiction. No Seurat's Sunday afternoon here; no happy throngs. The narrator sits in a darkened movie house in the days of silent film, witnessing the unfolding courtship of his parents. "The shots themselves," he explains, "are full of dots and rays, as if it were raining when the picture was photographed. The light is bad." And in the narrative itself there are few rays and many dots: the sentences are short and declarative:

  As my father enters, my grandfather rises from the table and shakes hands with him. My mother has run upstairs to tidy herself. My grandmother asks my father if he has had dinner, and tells him that Rose will be downstairs soon. My grandfather opens the conversation by remarking on the mild June weather. My father sits uncomfortably near the table, holding his hat in his hand. My grandmother tells my aunt to take my father's hat.

  These flat, even commonplace, cadences—as flat and commonplace as the name Schwartz—appear to have no affinity with the baroque Delmorean movements of the poems. Did the same mind coin them? At first sight, hardly; the gap between verse and fiction seems antagonistic, nearly schizophrenic: on the one hand wild eloquence (the wine pitcher broken and spilling), while on the other subdued dry orderliness. Yet the stories have a labyrinthine undersea quality; cumulatively, the pedestrian turns tragic and surreal. As the narrator sees his father proposing marriage to his mother on the movie screen, he leaps out of his seat and shouts, "Don't do it. It's not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous." What has begun prosaically becomes hideously visionary: the Delmorean abyss again opening, ready to swallow the dreamer; the dreamer's prefigured and ineluctable birth dreaded and doomed. It is a terrifying tale of the willed abortion of the self.